Are you one of those people who tend to use their hands to try and explain something? Many of us are guilty of doing this and we might find it difficult to get across what we are trying to express using just the spoken word. It’s great to be able to doodle or sketch to really get across what you’re trying to say, but this can be of course really difficult if you are trying to communicate with an outsourcer, who may be thousands of miles away.

When it comes to communicating with a virtual assistant or outsourcer, you often have to be very explicit if you want to achieve a certain result. Many of us are guilty of “assuming” far too much, but it doesn’t take too long before a number of incorrect or incomplete results teach us that we need to be a bit more explicit with our instructions.

Sometimes it can be quite difficult to explain what you want to achieve in writing, as well. You may feel that you need to add a diagram or two and this can become quite time-consuming to put it mildly. If you find that you are spending almost as much time trying to explain the final outcome as you might expect to do the job yourself, this is clearly not productive.

Thankfully, answers are at hand. One particular service, known as Jing Project, is a godsend. This particular creation is free to use, although with some limitations. Essentially, Jing enables you to show somebody how to do something by capturing an up to 5 min. video of your screen or a simple screen capture. It is “simplicity personified” to use and once you are finished recording your video you can upload it to screencast.com. From there you just send your Virtual Assistant the URL and they can view the video complete with detailed, visual instructions. At Arc Virtual Assistants all of our clients are given access to a client area to upload their work. To enable smooth running of the client area our clients are provided with instructional videos, created using Jing, an example of which is below.

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Jing can be particularly useful if you want to give instructions to an outsourcer about how to interact with a certain programme, how to log into a site for example and treat particular information a certain way. We all find it a lot easier if we are shown how to do something instead of, or in addition to, simply reading about how to do it. Jing is the perfect answer. It does have the limitation of 5 minutes as we’ve said and if your instructions are likely to last longer than that you may need to consider its big brother programme, called Camtasia. Alternatively, you can break down your instructions into a series of smaller projects, or “chapters” if you will.Remember that you cannot edit your file in Jing. However, you must also keep in mind that you’re not trying to prepare a professional video production, but something that enables you to really communicate with your outsourced team, while leaving no room for misinterpretation. If you do want to produce a very professional video for distribution to clients, for example, you need to move up to a professional video editing programme.

Have you used Jing or Camtasia before? We’d love to read your comments.

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